I’ve always been frustrated by how mysterious quaternions are. They arise from weird equations that you just have to memorize, and are difficult to debug because as soon as you deviate too far from the identity quaternion, the numbers are really hard to interpret. Most people implement quaternions once and then treat them as a black box forever after. So I had put quaternions off as one of those weird complicated 4D mathematical constructs that mathematicians sometimes invent that magically works as long as I don’t mess with it.

That is until recently, when I came across the paper Imaginary Numbers are not Real – the Geometric Algebra of Spacetime which arrives at quaternions using only 3D math, using no imaginary numbers, and in a form that generalizes to 2D, 3D, 4D or any other number of dimensions. (and quaternions just happen to be a special case of 3D rotations)

In the last couple weeks I finally took the time to work through the math enough that I am convinced that this is a much better way to think of quaternions. So in this blog post I will explain…

… how quaternions are 3D constructs. The 4D interpretation just adds confusion

… how you don’t need imaginary numbers to arrive at quaternions. The term will not come up (other than to point out the places where other people need it, and why we don’t need it)

… where the double cover of quaternions comes from, as well as how you can remove it if you want to (which makes quaternions a whole lot less weird)

… why you actually want to keep the double cover, because the double cover is what makes quaternion interpolation great

Unfortunately I will have to teach you a whole new algebra to get there: Geometric Algebra. I only know the basics though, so I’ll stick to those and keep it simple. You will see that the geometric algebra interpretation of quaternions is much simpler than the 4D interpretation, so I can promise you that it’s worth spending a little bit of time to learn the basics of Geometric Algebra to get to the good stuff.

I had to get there eventually. I had a blog post called “I Wrote a Fast Hashtable” and another blog post called “I Wrote a Faster Hashtable.” Now I finally wrote the fastest hashtable. And by that I mean that I have the fastest lookups of any hashtable I could find, while my inserts and erases are also really fast. (but not the fastest)

The trick is to use Robin Hood hashing with an upper limit on the number of probes. If an element has to be more than X positions away from its ideal position, you grow the table and hope that with a bigger table every element can be close to where it wants to be. Turns out that this works really well. X can be relatively small which allows some nice optimizations for the inner loop of a hashtable lookup.

If you just want to try it, here is a download link. Or scroll down to the bottom of the blog post to the section “Source Code and Usage.” If you want more details read on.

This is a follow up to my previous blog post about writing a faster sorting algorithm. I’m using this as a chance to go into detail on topics that I was asked about in the comments: I’ll clear up some misunderstandings and go into future work that needs to happen with this algorithm.

Somebody was nice enough to link my blog post on Hacker News and Reddit. While I didn’t do that, I still read most of the comments on those website. For some reasons the comments I got on my website were much better than the comments on either of those websites. But there seem to be some common misunderstandings underlying the bad comments, so I’ll try to clear them up.

Some libraries are so small they’re almost not worth sharing. But the C++ standard has a giant hole in that it doesn’t provide an easy way to quickly generate truly random numbers: It has std::mt19937_64 which quickly generates pseudo-random numbers, and it has std::random_device, which slowly generates truly random numbers.

The easiest way to quickly generate truly random numbers is to use a std::random_device to seed a std::mt19937_64. That way we pay a one-time cost of using random device to generate a seed, and then have quick random numbers after that. Except that the standard doesn’t provide a way to do that. In fact it’s more dangerous than that: It provides an easy wrong way to do it (use a std::random_device to generate a single int and use that single int as the seed) and it provides a slow, slightly wrong way to do it. (use a std::random_device to fill a std::seed_seq and use that as the seed) There’s a proposal to fix this, (that link also contains reasons for why the existing methods are wrong) but I’ve actually been using a tiny class for this:

These days it’s a pretty bold claim if you say that you invented a sorting algorithm that’s 30% faster than state of the art. Unfortunately I have to make a far bolder claim: I wrote a sorting algorithm that’s twice as fast as std::sort for many inputs. And except when I specifically construct cases that hit my worst case, it is never slower than std::sort. (and even when I hit those worst cases, I detect them and automatically fall back to std::sort)

Why is that an unfortunate claim? Because I’ll probably have a hard time convincing you that I did speed up sorting by a factor of two. But this should turn out to be quite a lengthy blog post, and all the code is open source for you to try out on whatever your domain is. So I might either convince you with lots of arguments and measurements, or you can just try the algorithm yourself.

Following up from my last blog post, this is of course a version of radix sort. Meaning its complexity is lower than O(n log n). I made two contributions:

I optimized the inner loop of in-place radix sort. I started off with the Wikipedia implementation of American Flag Sort and made some non-obvious improvements. This makes radix sort much faster than std::sort, even for a relatively small collections. (starting at 128 elements)

I generalized in-place radix sort to work on arbitrary sized ints, floats, tuples, structs, vectors, arrays, strings etc. I can sort anything that is reachable with random access operators like operator[] or std::get. If you have custom structs, you just have to provide a function that can extract the key that you want to sort on. This is a trivial function which is less complicated than the comparison operator that you would have to write for std::sort.

If you just want to try the algorithm, jump ahead to the section “Source Code and Usage.”

I recently learned how radix sort works, and in hindsight it’s weird that I never really learned about it before, and that it doesn’t seem to be widely used. In this blog post I claim that std::sort should use radix sort for large arrays, and I will provide a simple implementation that does that.

But first an explanation of what radix sort is: Radix sort is a O(n) sorting algorithm working on integer keys. I’ll explain below how it works, but the claim that there’s an O(n) searching algorithm was surprising to me the first time that I heard it. I always thought there were proofs that sorting had to be O(n log n). Turns out sorting has to be O(n log n) if you use the comparison operator to sort. Radix sort does not use the comparison operator, and because of that it can be faster.

The other reason why I never looked into radix sort is that it only works on integer keys. Which is a huge limitation. Or so I thought. Turns out all this means is that your struct has to be able to provide something that acts somewhat like an integer. Radix sort can be extended to floats, pairs, tuples and std::array. So if your struct can provide for example a std::pair<bool, float> and use that as a sort key, you can sort it using radix sort.

Shenzhen I/O is a brilliant game. In case you haven’t heard of it, it’s a game about programming micro-controllers. It distills programming down to the fun parts, removing the inertia, self-inflicted complexity, overhead, uncertainty and drag of real programming. It’s just about coming up with clever tiny algorithms and micro-optimizing the heck out of them. It’s great alone, but it’s even better if you have a friend that’s playing at the same time. Competing on the leaderboards for puzzles is enormous fun. From playing that game, here are a couple lessons:

1. There is no optimal code. There is only code that’s faster than the code that you’re comparing to

Shenzhen I/O shows you a histogram of all the scores that other people have reached. If my solution would fall on the right of the bell curve, I would optimize it until I was on the left. After a lot of work I would usually arrive at an “optimal” solution that puts me in the best bracket on the histogram. Those solutions were always far from optimal.

The addition of move semantics in C++11 is not just a performance and safety improvement. It’s also the feature that completed RAII. And as of C++11 I believe that RAII is absolutely necessary to make object composition easy in the language.

To illustrate let’s look at how objects were composed before C++11, what problems we ran into, and how everything just works automatically since C++11. Let’s build an example of three objects:

Before C++11 composition looked something like this. It was OK to have a vector of floats, but you’d never have a vector of more expensive objects because any time that that vector re-allocates, you’d have a very expensive operation on your hand. So instead you’d write a vector of pointers. Let’s implement all those functions:

I’m trying to get into neural networks. There have been a couple big breakthroughs in the field in recent years and suddenly my side project of messing around with programming languages seemed short sighted. It almost seems like we’ll have real AI soon and I want to be working on that. While making my first couple steps into the field it’s hard to keep that enthusiasm. A lot of the field is still kinda handwavy where when you want to find out why something is used the way it’s used, the only answer you can get is “because it works like this and it doesn’t work if we change it.”

At least that’s my first impression. Still just dipping my toes in. But there is one thing I am very impressed with: How much data neural networks can express in how few connections.

I have been cautiously optimistic about VR for a while: DK1 and DK2 made me feel motion sick pretty quickly, but I could see that there was something neat there. Being able to effortlessly look around changes how the game feels. When you could lean forward in the DK2, it highlighted how constrained our camera has always been in games. Still I didn’t quite get what this would be useful for other than puzzle games.

The obvious use case is for news reports and videos. When I now see pictures from Syria I want to have a 360 degree picture to be able to look around and get a better feel for the situation. But for video games, VR didn’t quite click for me.

At GDC I played two games that used the Oculus and Vive controllers, and now I finally get what you can do with VR in gamesthat you can’t do otherwise: You can use your own hands to interact with things in the virtual world.